Lecture: (Non-)Shifting egocentricals in the vast grey area of Russian 'semi-indirect-speech'

When we talk, we constantly refer to other people and things they say. Everyone knows direct and indirect speech, but "the traditional opposition between direct and indirect report involves a range of intermediate types" (Teptiuk 2022: 44). Russian colloquial language is a particularly interesting case. In constructions looking like indirect speech you may find exclamations or even imperatives and deictic elements might refer to other people than you would expect ("he said that come to me tomorrow", "they said that well take a look"). In a small-scale corpus study I tried to track the shifting and non-shifting egocentricals in Russian colloquial language. These egocentricals include not only deictic elements, but also words like 'seemingly' or 'naturally' that my refer to various participants' opinions (seeming or natural for whom?). These elements were studied by Elena Padučeva, the most prominent expert in Russian semantics, but only for the literary language.The examples from the Russian National Corpus, in turn, put into question some of Padučeva's theories. They also give interesting insights into Russian society, featuring politics, personal dramas and 'a giant smoking vagina'.

Padučeva, E. V. (2019): Egocentričeskie edinicy jazyka. Moskva: Izdatel'skij Dom JaSK.

Teptiuk, Denys (2022): Person alignment in reported speech and thought. The distribution and typology of participant roles (based on six Finno-Ugric languages). In: Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2 (2), S. 39–92.

Info

Day: 2024-05-10
Start time: 16:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: Seashell (33.4.032)
Track: Corpus Linguistics
Language: en

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